But to be fair, by the time I'd done the first couple (mostly all cut or edited) scenes I realized I hated digital inking, and those pages aren't a fair example of my art quality because I was trying to comic 'properly' and I was never cut out for that. This was one of the ones I traditionally inked. Anyone who's seen me comment that I don't ink might now understand why. I don't think I did more than fourteen pages like that, and in that time I did like, four different scenes, so you know. =P

It didn't take long before I started trying to paint pages, because inking gave me a headache. This is probably a better glimpse at my early comic pages since this is the style I've since retained and polished.

July 2008. This is the page I consider the best out of my early painting attempts; it was the second one I did and I put more effort into it than a lot of the other earlier ones.
(If you want an idea of what the worse end of the scale for my early attempts was... here's a page from August 2008.)

Since I've been going at it for a year and a half, here's a page from December 2008, six months after I started if you want something in the middle to compare.

The beginning was a lot of getting used to how I was going to draw the characrters, and the brushes I would use and all. And then of course there's also the part where I changed Imy's hair color after a few strips _________________

Yanno, it doesn't seem like there should be room for much improvement given that I'm using CGI-generated art, but there really is. I suspect this is a testament to how pig-ignorant I was when I started than anything.

A panel from my second week (I'm not doing full pages, those are huge):

The biggest change is the lighting, which I can't take much credit for: I finally broke down and bought a light set rather than rigging my own. It is much kinder to characters with dark skin, especially. And I've improved my posing somewhat. But the real skill jump for me has been panel composition. At some point I figured out that I wasn't limited to two sizes of panel, "full" or "half", which helped a lot. I also got a lot better at centering the characters, changing the angle, and zooming the camera in so we could, yanno, see their faces. And then there's the speech bubbles. I still struggle with these (yeah, that last one is too small again) but I have managed to get it through my head that the tails don't need to be stuck in people's mouths.

Like I said. Long way to go yet, and the improvement's more a testament to pig-ignorance than anything, but... at least it's improvement, right?_________________

charlie, I'm impressed by the consistency of style in Holy Mole; the layouts are punchier, the poses more dynamic, but line and detail has stayed consistent, which is very impressive.

Darc, the inking you're doing now is a huge plus! :D

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My stuff:

Princess and the Giant, Page 2 (first one with the princess), May:
Page 22, today:
I'm still drawing her a bit different each page, though. She doesn't usually have such an emo hairstyle, for instance. ;)

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A* is a bit harder to compare because I'm constantly switching camera angles, environments, and outfits. So here are two comparisons between episode 1 (March) and episode 6 (specifically, work from this past week) that may give something of an idea of changes in technique:

....For my own stuff, well... the really early pages don't really show much, so here's one of the first pages where I settled into the technique I ended up using for the rest of the comic-- sort of, anyway.

For the next... Friday's page.

This one does show an improvement in scenery-- I also started using more markers to shade (earlier I was only using one tone for everything), so there can be more depth.

I think the most improvement has been in my handling of faces and figures, though-- so since the latest page doesn't show this very well, here's a panel from another recent one (it is also really huge so you can see how massively rough my work is XD Does get the expressions across though!):

smbhax, read though The Princess and The Giant recently, I really liked it. Love the kind of woodcut style. But then I'm a sucker for b&w art.

Thanks, glad you like it. You may be the first person to refer to the art in my comics as "woodcut" style (although I have a bad memory so I could be totally wrong on that :o), and yeah that is a term I've thought of before in reference to it. For instance although this comic has what is probably my worst drawing of the main character (ack), I really like the part around her feet, because it seems particularly wood-cutty to me. And I draw with CTRL+X, so cutting really is an apt description.

I find it interesting that your comic's art went from gray tones to more straight up black and white. Was that a conscious stylistic change?_________________

I think the most improvement has been in my handling of faces and figures, though-- so since the latest page doesn't show this very well, here's a panel from another recent one (it is also really huge so you can see how massively rough my work is XD Does get the expressions across though!):

I like how you've progressed from stock anime-type faces to faces with actual expression and individuality. I see so many comics that look nice on the surface but are just stuck in that generic anime look, it gets kind of depressing sometimes. =p

I like the looseness and variability of your lines; you get nice results from that brush pen. I used to try "painting" on the computer, pressure sensitive tablets and all that, but it really just doesn't come anywhere close to what a real brush can do.

I also liked this from the end of your interesting "about" page:

Quote:

I don't have a single solid script for the entire comic; the tone of a panel or a scene can change depending on nuances in the art, so I don't want to commit myself in advance to some line of dialogue that may end up not working out quite as I'd meant it to in the final. This means that the story and characters are constantly evolving in some rather unpredictable ways, which makes the process of making it more interesting for me.

That's something I try to do, too--to let the thing evolve in what I guess you could call an organic way, drawings and writing and mistakes and all. I intentionally try to avoid falling into formulas for drawing figures and faces so that that change and learning process can keep happening. The individual results can look "rough" and "inconsistent," but it keeps the process interesting for me...and hopefully keeps the comic interesting for some readers, too._________________

It went through a lot of style shifts until looking more consistently like
Page 71, old version of Millennium (circa...2005?):

(I actually still like this page)

Second page, new version of Millennium (circa 2008):

Considering I drew that earlier last year I've gotten a little better since then, too...just not much farther.
I think Lovefeast has changed since last year, too, but not quite as drastically. I started Millennium way back when I didn't actually know how to draw, and was too lazy about coloring to actually color it!
I still have lots of issues with black and white art and comicing. I hope to overcome those in Lovefeast. I have issues painting backgrounds in color, too, but I'll have to get over that much more quickly._________________

On my current main comic, the first strip doesn't show much since it's from the main character's perspective, so I'll break the rules a little bit and show the third strip (the first one which shows the character's face):
and the 209th strip:
(The wrinkly one is the main character's mother, who had the main character via parthenogenesis, hence their similar appearances.)

Oh, and for perhaps the most profound difference, my journal comics have changed a lot (since they're more about experimentation). Here's the first one:
and the most recent:
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i am a busy bee